This paper was presented at the New Forest Knowledge Conference 2018 entitled: The Role of Commoning in the Maintenance of Landscape and Ecology: A New Forest, National and Global Perspective.
Speaker:
Jenny Phelps, Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group, South West
Abstract
There is a widespread recognition that there have been dramatic changes across the countryside in the UK over the past 70 years. Currently environmental land management initiatives tend to be top-down, driven by large institutions citing national legislation, policy obligations and international Directives and Conventions. Local communities, including farmers, who may nevertheless feel protective of the natural assets within their vicinity (that may also make a considerable contribution to a local sense of identity), may feel alienated from the imposition of targets relating to these same assets from whose formulation they have been excluded. However, such communities frequently have essential knowledge, experience and a sense of pride and commitment to the future survival of such areas. Furthermore the range of national organisations, strategies and policy frameworks can sometimes end up working against each other in a particular area. This is particularly true of complex sites and issues that contain a wide range of legal obligations and other interests. In such multi-objective areas there is a real need for greater connectivity at all levels, local, regional and national, to enable a synergy to be possible on the ground. This lack of co-ordination, coherence and integration at the national (and even regional) level results in a series of confusing, disjointed and contradictory signals and mechanism for those who live and work close to these areas and, most importantly, have the capacity to assist in their management and governance.
While it is possible to see how these tensions have developed, largely through the shift in power away from productivist agriculture and towards measures aimed at halting environmental decline, the need to embrace a holistic multi-objective approach that inspires and enables farmers and local communities is pressing. The international institutions without the engagement of local people, who feel distanced and even disenfranchised from their own land as a result, undermines the environmental imperative. Within Gloucestershire, the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG) have been developing an integrated local delivery (ILD) model, implemented in a range of situations that utilises and enables those with local skills and environmental land management knowledge that contributes to the management of sensitive and key environmental sites.
The following contribution was written by New Forest Heritage Centre volunteer Chris Blake.
LGBT+ history has until recently been quite biased towards public figures whose lives were subject to greater public scrutiny, and whose private correspondence was archived. Most people in the New Forest have not historically lived such public, well-recorded lives. Irrespective of fame, many people in the past and present alike would prefer privacy from stigma and scrutiny, or would have chosen to focus their lives on different legacies within their local community. Unfortunately, before the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships in 1957, secrecy was also a very real imperative. Sometimes this literally involved burning diaries and letters. It is unsurprising that these details of people’s private lives have often not been preserved.
As a result, there are few openly LGBT+ life stories recorded in the New Forest Heritage centre archives. The late Lord Montagu of Beaulieu is largely represented by his contributions to the local community and the study of local heritage. However, the decriminalisation of homosexuality owes a lot to the inquiry that resulted from public response to his trial in the 1950s.
Thanks to that decriminalisation, LGBT+ people now have greater choice as to how they live those aspects of their lives. Stigma is still a persistent challenge, but that is after all why these stories must be told.
The following contribution was written by New Forest Heritage Centre volunteer Chris Blake.
For the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, this article compiles some of the memories of local people of that time, recorded in the archive of the New Forest Heritage Centre. These give us a window looking back onto the scale and humanity of the events surrounding D-Day in 1944. In these recollections, the intrusion of the War into everyday life contrasts with many recognisable elements in the experience of living and growing up around the New Forest today. The following quotes provide a unique historic narrative that speaks for itself:
The Americans Arrive
“The girls were waving and cheering. Most people were smiling. The soldiers all seemed to be very well built and they were loaded down with equipment and guns. Most were either smoking or chewing gum. I think everyone was pleased to see them. Later, they arranged games and parties for the children. There were dances to which everyone went and had a great time.” – Jimmy Charlton, Brockenhurst1
“In early 1944, British and American armies were camped in the woods all arounds our cottage – a variety of vehicles, many camouflaged. Various troops, every morning, filled their water containers from a hose my father had rigged up.” – David White, Woodlands 2
“I remember waving to the never ending convoys of troops, many of them Americans, as they passed Lawn View. Many sweets were thrown over the fence to me. My mother, however, insisted that I did not eat any of the chewing gum!” – Peter Bromfield, Burley 3
The Build Up to D-Day
“For us boys it was glorious, it was just so much fun. We used to go into the camps. Our favourite one was on Alder Cliff. In the big houses there that then used to lay at the back there. We used to go there Saturday mornings and queue up with the troops for lunch or dinner, and used to go in and they used to say “Yeah, come on kid, if you want something to eat, you queue up”. We used to have chicken. We only had a scrawny chicken or a duck at Christmas and that was it, but these guys were having chicken more or less every meal, and we could not believe it. The food we used to get, and I can remember one time when the cook – I went into the cookhouse – and the cook there said “You want some corned beef kid?” and I said “Yes”. So he gave me a big long pack and I can remember arriving home with it on the handlebars from Milford to Woodside.” – David Bayliss 4
“For weeks, if not months, before D-Day we knew something was up because as we cycled around the areas – which we did far and often- we saw the vehicle, fuel and ammunition dumps, and all sorts of other equipment both in the Forest and at the airfields of Holmsley, Stoney Cross and Beaulieu.” – Desmond Hollier, Sway 5
“The Forest, yes, we gave a lot of shows there. And just prior to D-Day of course, the Forest was full up, under canvas, and well we concentrated on them, because of course we knew something was afoot but of course, we didn’t know what. And of course we didn’t realise they were all going off from there. The army were very, very good. They’d arrange Marquees to do the shows in and the soldiers would even build stages and things, it was surprising what they did do. But they were always happy shows and we had a lot of forces for entertainment and we drew them into it. It would be very corny now of course looking back on it, but we would have four seats on the stage and four men sitting on the seats and four girls sitting on the men’s laps. Then another one would come in with four bottles, baby’s bottles, full of milk you see and they’d take one each and the first one to finish was the winner and he would get an enamel babies potty with all the artist’s names on (laughs). I don’t know if any are still about (laughs) I’m sure there were hundreds of them!” – Betty Hockey, Concert Party Dancer 6
“The general security was very, very strict, in fact stricter and stricter as time went on. And you had to have a pass to get everywhere. We were allowed in or out of this area, or not as the case may be. This actually pleased my brother and me because we couldn’t go to (*boarding*)school, which was very nice.” – John Roper-Curzon, the late 20th Baron Teynham (Pylewell Park, near Lymington) 1
“When it came up for D-Day, all the camps were closed and they had big signs on the sides of the road ‘You are forbidden to speak to the troops’. They weren’t allowed out of the camps anymore, and you weren’t allowed to speak to them.” – Edith Daniels 7
“My mother walked along the lane where she saw the most secret thing of all, which was the black and white stripes painted on the underneath and on the fuselage and the wings of the American planes. This was of course the new Allied identification.” – John Roper-Curzon, the late 20th Baron Teynham (Pylewell Park, near Lymington) 1
“On D-Day minus one, I was visited by a patient at a cottage on the shore by Pitts Deep and had the impression of being able to walk right across to the Island from craft to craft, the Solent being so full of them.” – Dr Basil Fulton 1
“… Hundreds of ships from horizon to horizon, which for us was from the Needles on the Isle of Wight to Old Harry Rocks at Studland Bay.” – Desmond Hollier, Sway 5
The Delay
“All the convoys and where they were, stationed under the trees and all the side roads and small roads. It was just amazing, they were everywhere. And of course, just prior to D-Day, it had to be put off a day because of the weather.” – Betty Hockey, Concert Party Dancer 6
“They were all embarked in all the landing craft, and as the weather was so terrible the powers that be decided that they’d have to put D-Day off for 24 hours. And then they thought, “What can we do to keep up the spirits of the men who are on board?” and so they chose two Wrens, myself and another, whose name I don’t remember, and we sailed all the way down Southampton Water in a naval ML, waving at the men. Really I suppose the idea was to keep their spirits up. But we…both the other girl and I, knew perfectly well what …what it was all about – you couldn’t hide it then from people then in Southampton that D-Day was very imminent. And at the end of all that they took us on board the Admiral’s flagship – I don’t remember the Admiral’s name but it was HMS Bulolo and they gave us tea in the wardroom. And what I can remember is, we had white bread which I hadn’t seen since beginning of the war.” – Margaret Seeley, WRNS 8
The Departure
“I remember going out one day and seeing nothing but tents and soldiers. One called Jim called me ‘Nipper’ and gave me a football – bladder only… And of course, they must have been British, because of the nickname and the shape of the ball. I remember the tanks thundering down the road towards Lyndhurst on their way out. Then, suddenly, Waters Green was empty of soldiers. I went out with the football for days afterwards, hoping Jim would come back, kicking my precious football backwards and forwards till lunchtime.” – Bruce Smith, Brockenhurst 9
“We didn’t know what was happening, but we knew something was happening because every nook and cranny in the Forest had camouflage nets with troops and things, you know, obviously all getting ready. And then when at the actual D-Day times of course there was a continual stream of…. the planes started about 3 o’clock in the morning and went on all the time, the Dakotas going over and the bombers going over and the…the lorries were…were full of troops, were…were just going on all day. We sort of abandoned work on…on D-Day virtually, to wave to them going past. Nothing official, we, you know, they were soldiers, and they were waving and we were waving to them ‘coz we knew they were going off somewhere but we didn’t know what. The invasion hadn’t… hadn’t been publicised, obviously, it had started but you know, but it hadn’t got public. But you know, we were waving to them all, and, because the forest was cleared then. When we went home all those soldiers that had been hiding in the trees had all disappeared. All gone. And we felt very sad about that, you know, because, you know, we knew they were going to war and half of them wouldn’t come back. And it… you know, it was a sad time but exciting at the same time.” – Vera Storr, Millersford 10
“When the D-day troops actually left, the day – the morning they left to go to, to embark for France, we children stood alongside the road and sort of waved them off as it were, and they just threw all their English cash out of the vehicles and landed in the road and threw it to us and picked it up and to us in those days 2s-6d was a fortune. And all this money came out because obviously they decided they didn’t want English money anymore, so they just threw it all out of their vehicles as they drove past us. So, we made quite a killing in terms of cash on (chuckle) that particular occasion.” – Ronald Mintram 11
“About four o’clock in the morning there was this awful noise. I thought “What’s the heck’s that?” So, I got up and looked out the window and they were moving. All our soldiers were gone in our garden and our neighbours both sides. They’d all gone. And they were just going down the road. And it’s so exciting, watching all these people. Watching all these people going, you know. And so my Mum said ‘You won’t be able to go to school today ‘cos you won’t be able to get up the road’. There was trailers with tanks on and “ducks” are they called? Lots and lots of those. There was tanks and there was one or two – like folded up aeroplanes. I don’t know what they were like, they were on these things. And my sister and I we just watched them all the time and of course all the kiddies in the area came out. We were quite an audience, all us children.” – Iris Cooper 12
“The troops moved out just prior to D-Day. My sister and I stood at our gate and many American soldiers threw us Hershey chocolate bars, which we stored in the hedge in our front garden.” – David White, Woodlands 2
“We had a big copse at the end of our fields, and I can remember they were Canadian or American, and there were no end of soldiers everywhere, which I presume now must have been near D-Day. Because there was so many people about that time, or soldiers about at that time, and then suddenly one morning we got up to go to school or just realised that everything was quiet and everything had gone. Just like as if they’d never been there.” – Edwina Bright, Fritham 13
“The next day there wasn’t anything to be seen, there was no soldiers, sailors, air force. No vehicles, nothing. Just absolutely nothing. As if they’d all vanished into thin air.” – Betty Hockey, Concert Party Dancer 6
“One morning when we got up, they were all gone. The tanks were all gone and that was it. All back to normal sort of thing.” – Edith Daniels 7
“I can remember coming out of school and remember seeing – I think it was about 4 o’clock, maybe just as we came out of school – the sky was covered with Horsa gliders, the sky was full of gliders going across I suppose. Yeah, I suppose we’re lucky to see all this really, but we didn’t realise just how serious it all was. But I can remember during the war, I don’t think we were ever worried about it as children.” – David Bayliss 4
“…The most powerful memories were of the air armadas of hundreds of aircraft and gliders passing over us as they headed off for the invasion.” – Desmond Hollier, Sway 5
The Aftermath
“We were able to go into some of the deserted Camps that had been on high security only hours before. We were given some food rations. There were some soldiers left behind. When we asked where everybody had gone, one of the soldiers laughed and said, ‘they have gone to give Mr Hitler a big surprise’. It was a day later that my parents read the full news of D-Day.” – Maurice Taylor 1
“Everyone was talking about it the following day. In the next day or so as I was walking down Belmore Road one warm, sultry evening I could hear the gunfire from the Normandy beachhead.” – Dr Basil Fulton 1
“My most poignant memory of that time was of the days immediately following D-Day. Hospital trains painted with huge red crosses would rumble slowly through Brockenhurst Station from Southampton, travelling at no more than 15 or 20 miles an hour for obvious reasons.” – Anonymous, Brockenhurst 14
“I spent many hours, much to my mother’s concern, picking up the various mugs and pans left by the troops from their camps in the woods by dragging them and placing them at our back door.” – David White, Woodlands 2
“We had great times out and about on our old bikes, finding all sorts of stuff. We found tinned food, pieces of equipment that to this day I don’t know what they were, also helmets and spent ammunition. We kept away from the live ammunition. One lad lost some fingers playing with ammunition, so we knew it was silly. But no, it was like a treasure hunt really.” – Jimmy Charlton, Brockenhurst 1
“We went up to the copse, my mother – my parents and myself – and we found lots of bibles and prayer books, well not lots, but bibles and prayer books and even rations that they’d left obviously in quite a hurry. Inside one or two of them I can remember my mother finding an address and she either wrote or sent these books back. And we corresponded, or she corresponded, some years with the people in Canada and in America.” – Edwina Bright, Fritham 13
3 – Cockram, J., Williams, R., Burley Branch of the Royal British Legion (2015) Burley and the Two World Wars. Privately Published by John Cockram and Richard Williams; Brockenhurst. Available at: https://nfknowledge.org/record/nfc-154139/
4 – New Forest Remembers WWII Project Transcription Document for David Bayliss
The following contribution was written by New Forest Heritage Centre volunteer Chris Blake.
Born in 1902, Félicité Hardcastle grew up in Oxfordshire but had moved to Burley by the time she was 18. She lived there until she died in 1988, by which time she had become an established local historian and amateur botanist, and had been awarded the British Empire Medal for services to the community. The award citation described her as the ‘grand old lady of the New Forest’, but she immersed herself in village life in Burley before she was 20. She was particularly involved in the Scout movement as a longstanding Cubmaster and eventually Assistant District Commissioner. During WW2 she volunteered as a telephonist in Burley, assisting with the running of nearby military bases.
She was involved in numerous local clubs and societies, taught in the Sunday School, became a School Governor, and served on the Parish Council. Whilst on the Council she was particularly active in protecting Rights of Way. She recorded her detailed historical research in a book titled Records of Burley, and was involved in many archaeological excavations within the New Forest. Her passion was the accessible preservation of heritage for local communities, and the encouragement of young people. As a result, she lectured widely on local history and natural science at village events and Avon Tyrell youth centre. Her research notes, photographs, and letters were made publicly accessible at Hampshire Record Office after she died. These are now kept at Christopher Tower Reference Library in Lyndhurst, and act as testament to “Miss Hardcastle’s” dedication to her community and the heritage of the New Forest.
The following contribution was written by New Forest Heritage Centre volunteer Chris Blake.
The grave of ‘Admiral Sir Charles Burrard’ at St Michael & All Angels in Lyndhurst was recently restored by the Napoleonic and Revolutionary War Graves Charity. This is part of an initiative to ensure stories like his are not forgotten. Fortunately, Admiral Sir Charles Burrard and his family preserved their story in sketchbooks, held in the New Forest Heritage Centre.
Charles Burrard was born into a military family in 1793, third in line to inherit the baronetcy of Lymington. He joined the Royal Navy at the age of 11 , in 1805. By 1806 he was aboard HMS London as a Midshipman. This was during the Napoleonic Wars, months after the Battle of Trafalgar. In the morning darkness of the 13th March, French commerce raiders mistook the ships of his squadron for merchantmen. Before the French surrender, 10 men had been killed and 22 wounded aboard HMS London during hours of thunderous gunfire. Burrard later painted this event from a removed third-person viewpoint.
Shortly afterwards, Charles was transferred to HMS Victory. In January 1809, the Victory escorted transport ships to La Coruña, to evacuate British troops following their desperate retreat to the coast of Northern Spain. Charles’ eldest brother was ashore, serving as Aide de Camp to Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore. During the battle to defend the port and the possibility of evacuation, Charles’ brother was killed. It is likely that Charles was in the harbour at the time.
That October, his surviving older brother (also a Midshipman in the Navy) was drowned after his boat capsized near Weymouth. Charles was now unexpectedly first in line to inherit, aged about 16, having lost his older brothers. As the eldest son of a Baronet, he was entitled to a knighthood. Sir Charles was promoted to Lieutenant after three years and served in actions around the Mediterranean.
Sir Charles’ father died in 1813, apparently from a heart broken by the news of his other son’s death at the Siege of San Sebastian. Charles was now 2nd Baronet Lymington.
The following years saw his first commands, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He rose through the ranks of the Navy, and was often in the Mediterranean. There he met his future wife, Louisa Lushington, daughter of the British Consul-General in Naples. They married in 1826, returning to England in 1827.
Sir Charles was then pensioned out of the Navy aged 34, as a ‘Superannuated Captain’. A naval officer promoted to Captain was entitled to lifelong promotion in strict order of seniority, regardless of functional demand for higher-ranking officers. Sir Charles Burrard was promoted for the rest of his life, eventually becoming an Admiral.
He spent the rest of his life in and around the New Forest raising a large family, though he was ultimately the last Baronet Lymington. He and his wife likely helped teach their children to paint and draw. They dedicated these decades of peace to the Church, and the creation of an extraordinary painted archive of rural nineteenth century Hampshire.
Tom Charman‘s curious wooden carvings and mysterious, visionary works of art draw us into the enchanting world of fairies and elementals – revealing the legacy of a Victorian fascination for clairvoyance.
Woodcarving of the head of a pixie by New Forest Artist Tom Charman
Born in Horsham, Sussex on 14th March 1863, Tom’s parents ran a grocery, his father from a long tradition in farming, and his mother an educated woman with a love of literature. At the age of seven, Tom records seeing a fairy riding a brown rat in his bedroom although he was not to see another for 30 years.
An idyllic childhood
Completing his formal education at the age of 12, Tom’s love of the extraordinary led him to visit the music halls; his secretive excursions were often concluded by a beating from his strictly Methodist father. When his mother fell ill and, as the youngest in a large family, he was asked to remain at home, he would often sit and read to her through the night, further advancing his education.
At five feet and six inches, Tom was described in his son’s memoir as ‘of wiry build, fair-haired with a handsome well-boned face; quite a dandy in his bowler hat, high wing collar and cane walking stick’.
Tom unsuccessfully tried his hand at several occupations, including a door-to-door sewing machine salesman. A natural showman, by 1887 his love of performing and the music halls were providing him with considerable success as a ventriloquist, mime artist and character raconteur; he travelled the home counties performing solo and in a vaudeville partnership with his friend Jack Pain.
Tom Charman and Jack Pain c.1887–1889
Meanwhile, his distinctive artistic flair, inspired by Aubrey Beardsley and the caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson, had already brought some success – an early illustrative commission of numerous drawings for Charles Roper’s 1895 book Whispers from Fairyland.
Tom outside a wigwam in the New Forest in summer
By the turn of the century, Tom had joined a group of actors, artists and society eccentrics in search of an Arcadian lifestyle in the New Forest. They followed the fashionable trends for travelling in horse-drawn caravans and a passion for the natural world. Among his collection of friends was the Reverend James Leith Macbeth Bain, the spiritualist minister known as Brother James and famous for the hymn tune Brother James’s Air. It was such connections and experiences which would dictate Tom’s artistic future.
Still determined to use his natural gift for illustration, Tom decided to seek his fortune in America, funded by a small legacy following his mother’s death, where he worked briefly on a New Jersey newspaper as a cartoonist. It was an unhappy and lonely experience. Unable to create and persuaded he was being poisoned by his landlord, he soon returned to Sussex.
Tom’s proclivity to see fairies as an adult – and his aptitude for clairvoyance – were revived when he reconnected with the New Forest in a move to Nomansland, near Bramshaw. By 1911, the 49-year-old Tom had arrived to help his sister Sarah and brother-in-law William Halls in their post office, grocery and bakery. He had recently completed the illustrations for Henry Burstow’s Reminiscences of Horsham (1911) in which his father Michael is mentioned as a bell ringer, but he was struggling to make a living.
The Godshill Pottery bungalow
While walking in the Forest, Tom met the amateur geologist, anthropologist and Quaker Ernest Westlake, who was to found the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry in 1916 and set up a ‘Forest School’ on land at Sandy Balls, near Fordingbridge. Ernest had built a small wooden bungalow on The Ridge in Godshill and was living there, following his wife’s death, with his daughter Margaret and son Aubrey. Ernest and Tom discovered they shared many passions.
Stylised Figure Seated Cross-Legged with Large Ears by Tom Charman c.1919–1935
Inspired by the prehistoric charm and weird beauty of the New Forest, Tom produced literally hundreds of carvings, recreating the creatures and elemental spirits he perceived in the twisted roots, branches and twigs. He would also sit for hours drawing the ‘little people’ that appeared to him as he walked among the trees, and uncovering the images he believed they had created in found stones and flints.
Perched Bird with Folded Wings by Tom Charman c.1919–1935
As he became better known, the popular psychic magazines of the time looked on him as something of an authority and The Occult Review of February 1917 featured an article titled ‘A Seer of Nature Spirits’, on Tom’s discoveries: ‘a form of life which passes us by entirely in our normal states of consciousness’.
Tom’s business card
An exhibition of Tom’s carvings and stones was held at Brighton’s Old Sterne Hall (under the auspices of the Brighton Spiritualist Brotherhood, chaired by Countess Verneuil and attended on occasion by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Some 1,200 items were displayed which included ‘gnomes, lizards, snakes of all sorts, an Indian sacred beetle, a sea snail, and other weird objects…’ The report in the Sussex & Surrey Telegraph goes on: ‘He has seen Indians, clairvoyantly in the woods, and has reproduced some of them with almost uncanny exactness.’
Margaret and Tom Charman on horseback, early 1920s
In the early 1920s, Tom fell in love with Ernest’s daughter, the 22-year-old Margaret, an Oxford anthropology graduate. Much to Ernest’s consternation and despite his strong objections, the relationship blossomed and eventually Ernest relented, passing the bungalow to Margaret and Tom who would go on to set up the Godshill Pottery there, with the assistance and instruction of Denise Wren of Oxshott Pottery.
Tom and Margaret Charman with a caravan in fields at Robin’s Bush, New Forest, 1927
Tom and Margaret’s honeymoon – nine weeks camped in the Forest, living apparently on dry lentils and bloaters (a type of smoked herring) and, at first, accompanied by Ernest – was followed by a period on the road travelling in a Gypsy caravan. Finally, they returned to Godshill where all three set up home together. Ernest was tragically killed in London in 1922, aged 67, when he fell from the sidecar of his son Aubrey’s motorcycle as it struck a tramline.
Godshill Pottery on The Ridge, Godshill, New Forest in its heyday (currently closed)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at nearby Bignell Wood, a large house at Brook, and was also passionate about the existence of fairies. Sir Arthur became a frequent visitor to the little house on The Ridge, along with others intrigued by Tom’s theories and experiences.
Oil painting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1927, by Henry L. Gates (1872–1943)
Tom was described by Conan Doyle in his popular book Coming of the Fairies (1922) as one ‘who builds for himself a shelter in the New Forest and hunts for fairies as an entomologist would for butterflies’.
Stylised Figure Seated Bent Over with Arms on Knees c.1919–1935 by Tom Charman (1863–1939)
Tom’s haunting yet engaging wood carvings, decorated stones and flints, and strikingly spontaneous drawings – occasionally in charcoal but mostly in pen and ink, and watercolour – brought Tom recognition at London exhibitions in the late 1920s and 1930s. He and Margaret attended the annual Artist Craftsman shows (arranged by the Knox Guild of Design & Crafts) at Central Hall, Westminster from around 1929 to 1935. There he displayed and sold his work alongside other famous arts and crafts devotees as well as at gatherings of followers of the spirit world.
Woodpecker on Branch c.1919–1935 by Tom Charman (1863–1939)
It is a tribute to the late Danae Stammers (Tom’s daughter) and the Charman family that this collection is now in the care of the New Forest Heritage Centre in Lyndhurst.
The full story of the life of Tom and Margaret Charman and their children Chris and Danae is told in Christopher Pan Charman’s 2019 memoir In the Spirit of Godshill, published by and available from Millersford Press.
Young Christopher Pan Charman throwing a pot
A film of Chris Charman and his artist wife Kate – which includes Chris talking about his father’s carvings and how they revived Godshill Pottery – can be viewed on the Millersford Press website.
Sonia Aarons-Green, editor, writer and publisher at Millersford Press
The New Forest is managed as a working forest by the Forestry Commission, this includes the commercial growing and harvesting of trees. Most of this happens away from public eye, unless you happen to stumble across works happening in one of the inclosures on your walk or bike ride. However one of the times you get to personally appreciate this activity and even take a part of the New Forest home with you is at Christmas time. Picking out and decorating your very own tree can be one of the highlights of the festive season.
The tradition of having a decorated tree in your home is a rather recent adaptation for Christmas; whilst evergreen fir trees have been used to celebrate winter festivals for thousands of years, the Christmas tree in its current guise has only been popular in the UK since the nineteenth century.
The first publicly decorated Christmas tree on record was in 1510 in Riga, Latvia. The tree was put up by men wearing black hats who proceeded to first dance around the tree, and then set it on fire.
The tradition of decorated Christmas trees spread from Germany to the UK thanks to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. German born Albert had often celebrated Christmas with a tree as a youngster, and was keen to share this childhood treat with his new wife. In 1848 the Illustrated London News published a drawing of the royal couple with a beautifully decorated tree, and within a few years the sight was common throughout homes in Britain.
Since then the popularity of Christmas trees has reached dizzying heights. The UK goes through around eight million real trees annually according to the Forestry Commission.
British Pathe has two videos dealing with the annual New Forest Christmas tree harvest.
The following paper was presented at the New Forest Knowledge Conference 2017 entitled: New Forest Historical Research and Archaeology: who’s doing it? Below you will find the abstract of the paper and a video of the paper given if permission to film it was given by the speaker.
Speaker:
Richard Reeves
This paper first outlines the changes in the bounds of the New Forest using evidence from the Domesday Book, medieval and later perambulations. It will consider the changes in and challenges to the perambulation that have occurred through the history of the Forest. In particular, the period around the time of the designation of the Forest and subsequent reorganization of the Saxon hundredal boundaries to form the New Forest Hundred coterminous with the demesne lands of the Forest. Also following the implementation of the Carta de Foresta of 1217 and the struggles for disafforestation surrounding it. It will then briefly cover the formation of the Bailiwick and Walk boundaries into which the Forest was historically divided.
The second section will consider the individual bound-marks of the perambulations, particularly in reference to archaeological features, including prehistoric barrows, Roman roads and other route-ways, as well sites near contemporary with the bounds themselves, focusing on those relevant to the historic management of the Forest.
Lastly, the impact of the various bounds will be considered in terms of historic management, in particular commoning, with special reference to purlieus both outside and within the Forest, impacts on the jurisdictional history, specifically the interest of the various types of forest officers and legal history of the Forest, and what this tells us about the more widely about forest law.
In summary it will demonstrate how the designation of the Forest impacted on the development of the Forest and its hinterland, thereby creating the landscape we see today.
Discover the remains of a Second World War bombing site in the New Forest National Park from the the air.
5000 acres (equivalent to 2833 football pitches) of heathland in the North of the New Forest was taken over by the Aeroplane & Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) to become a training and testing range for all types of munitions fired and or dropped from British aircraft during WWII, except live incendiaries due to the fire risk.
The range consisted of several different target types including air to ground attack, mock ship targets, aircraft pens, gun emplacement, bomb fragmentation areas and the Ministry of Home Security target (known locally as the Sub Pens) as well as domestic facilities for crew, two small grass airstrips, observation shelters and towers. The range was split with one area for inert ordnance only. The site was also used day and night with one, the illumination target specifically for night raid practice.
On this site the Ashley Range Overview page has links to more detailed pages about the range targets, activities and stories from the people stationed here and the locals living nearby.
Discover the remains of a Second World War bombing site in the New Forest National Park from the the air.
5000 acres (equivalent to 2833 football pitches) of New Forest heathland was taken over by the Aeroplane & Armament Experimental Establishment (A&AEE) in 1940 to become its training and testing range. All types of munitions fired and or dropped from British aircraft during WWII were tested here first, except live incendiaries due to the fire risk.
The range consisted of several different target types including air to ground attack, mock ship targets, aircraft pens, gun emplacement, bomb fragmentation areas and the Ministry of Home Security target (known locally as the Sub Pens) as well as domestic facilities for crew, two small grass airstrips, observation shelters and towers some of which survive today.
On this site the Ashley Range Overview page has links to detailed pages about the targets, activities, archives and stories about the range.
